Andrea Di MaioYesterday I had the pleasure to present “The Future of Government Is No Government” to a group of officials from the European Commission, mostly coming from the Directorate General for Information Society and Media.
It was great to meet many familiar faces. In fact, before joining Gartner, I spent four years at the European Commission in Brussels. I do know many government organizations, but the European Commission is really one of a kind. For those of you who know little about the European Institutions, the closest thing to the Commission is a federal government, but with member states enjoying a much stronger autonomy, let alone different languages, long histories and cultural traits. There are people working there from more than 27 countries and the official languages they have to deal with are 23. Although it is perceived as a behemoth from the outside, it is actually a pretty efficient organization, taking into account that it has an almost impossible task (get all 27 member states agree about policies) and a wide array of cultures and attitudes.
The presentation seemed to engage the audience quite a lot. I could sense some level of discomfort at times though: for instance when I downplayed the role of whole-of-government enterprise architecture and when I compared government portals to the national flag (something you need for national pride, but don’t expect any further useful service from).
Most people bought into the concept that a scenario where governments have to choose where to be involved directly in service delivery and where to leave that to external entities is a plausible one. Of course, the financial crisis and the deep recession (nobody wanted to use a stronger word, but it was in everybody’s mind) call for though choices: one cannot have citizen-centricity and growth and stability all at the same time.
There were several interesting questions.
Some revolved around security and trust: would a more decisive move toward mashups and a web oriented architecture create greater vulnerabilities and what should the government responsibility be there?
Others were on the role of an interoperability framework. The European Commission is currently engaged in developing the second version of the so-called “European Interoperability Framework” and some of my views about the declining relevance of such frameworks raised some concern. I did clarify that, although government (web) services will have to interoperate more and more with non-government ones (such as external data wallets, services run by social networks or intermediaries, and so forth), there will always be areas – such as public safety or corporate taxation – where process and data integration across government applications in different member states makes a lot of sense.
Among all observations from the audience, the one I liked most came from a director who said that the “blurring boundary” phenomenon that underpins most of my presentation (where I say that boundaries between jurisdictions, between industry sectors, between citizens and officials, and so forth, get progressively blurred) is very pertinent to how the role of Europe and its institutions is evolving. Once more, looking at the current situation, there are fundamental questions about whether member states (or even regions, provinces or counties in member states) will retract within their boundaries, or they will leverage the fact that they are part of a larger Union. How should responsibilities be redistributed among different European Institutions, members states, society and the market in order to reignite growth? Of course all these questions are far beyond the scope of my presentation and anything we cover at Gartner. But I was pleased to see how my pitch could stimulate this sort of reflections.
Category: e-government web 2.0 in government Tags: web 2.0
4 responses so far ↓
1 Jacques Bus October 31, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I was one of those old EC colleagues of Andrea and it was good to see him again. I liked his presentation. It was a well-presented comprehensive view which gave a reasonable extrapolation of current trends. I would agree with many of his observations.
There are however comments to make.
The first one concerns the issue of shifting responsibility from government to citizens. It is true that there is a general tendency in public administration and industry towards the “do-it-yourself” economy. Think about Ikea, banks. Many many others will follow. At the same time however, there is a strong tendency, certainly in Europe, for citizens to ask governments to protect, care and cuddle them. Buckling up, social care, children protection, and now banking bail out are examples. Government must jump in to protect bankers and savers who all think they did nothing wrong, so the state should pay. How will this controversy between “Government care” and “less government” be solved in the long run? By more surveillance to make sure that people follow the rules of government to avoid liability? Or by finding a reasonable balance?
I think Andrea´s presentation was a bit too much US-biased and following the neo-conservative economic agenda of the “free market solves everything”. Well, it didn´t and Europeans do think differently on this. Moreover, things might change also in the US due to the crisis and the political consequences and changes.
A second issue, and I thoroughly disagree with Andrea on this, is his gliding over the problem of cyber crime. The attitude of getting so many good things that we must accept one or two bad things. This has led to a situation where crime has become so rampant on the Net and essentially destabilises the Net economy. This is an another example of exagerated free market thinking. It is not because we wanted a market economy in Russia, that we would automatically accept the Russian maffia take over the economy. We need to develop instruments that allow for law enforcement. Our societies are based on the rule of law, which guarantees us our freedom to talk, create and live our individual lives. We want to keep that, together with all the niceties that the digital age is promising us.
I believe that some fundamental issues should be solved in digital life concerning accountability on the Internet, transparency of data handling by public and private data collectors and law enforcement. I also think that a global (or first a European) identity management framework ensuring protection of personal data is a pre-requisite for that.
In the part of the ICT programme on Security and Trust, for which I am responsible as Head of Unit, much attention is given to research for trustworthy ICT (secure, reliable, with good reputation, know who you deal with, accountability, transparency, social acceptability, user convenience and acceptance etc.).
It must be clear that the above opinion is my personal one, and not a formal position of the Commission. Nevertheless, I see more and more movements in industry and public service towards giving more attention to the negative sides of ICT development and the need to address, all with the aim to ensure we can enjoy the positve sides.
2 Andrea Di Maio November 1, 2008 at 3:50 am
Jacques makes two very good points, and they both deserve an answer.
On the matter of shifting responsibilities from government to citizen, this clearly depends on what role governments already play today in different countries. Citizens in Scandinavia are generally happy with their government services while those in Italy are less so: therefore one might argue that this shift will happen more easily where society needs to replace or complement government functions where those are not perceived to be good enough. On the other hand, the financial crisis and the need for governments to divert substantial resources to sustain the economy will pose questions about what they need to stop doing (or do less of) and where society should step in to fill the gap. I made this point in an earlier post.
On the the matter of cybercrime, my position is that web 2.0 is indeed likely to give more opportunities to the bad guys to do damage, but also many more opportunities to good people (both citzens and government officials) to create value, and that this value will vastly counterbalance the risk of cybercrime. Further, as Jacques points out in his response, there are plenty of activities that governments worldwide are doing to boost trustworthy computing, while – in my honest opinion – there is comparatively less that they are doing on exploring how society can be usefully engaged in government service delivery.
Do no get me wrong: I believe that issues like security and privacy are absolutely fundamental for the vision of “Future of Government” to be realized. All I am saying is that in 10+ years of e-government they have often been used as excuses not to join up processes and exchange data even within government, without any thorough risk assessment. The point I made during my presentation was that mashups and social network engagement should be limited to the use of “public information” only, in order to better understand issues and risks and be able to articulate a strategy for mashing up services rather than information.
3 Paul Timmers November 3, 2008 at 8:53 am
Unfortunately I could not stay for the larger part of the discussion but the presentation was great. As I told Andrea afterwards, it triggers the audience to think, contest, apply to their own situation. So it works.
A few more comments: I think it is worthwhile if the reflection extends to the role & responsibilities of government beyond service delivery pur sang (e.g. trust, accountability, guaranteering equal rights/inclusion etc).
My other comment is to relate to the processes of change (planned/classical – evolutionary/market – processual/political – systemic/historic). I remembered an article of several years ago, based on Whittington about change management and decision-making. The argument is – of course – that history and politics will determine a lot of the outcomes and that therefore there will be multiple and un-planned outcomes.
4 Katarzyna Balucka-Debska November 4, 2008 at 5:41 am
- It’s been a pleasure to be exposed to some forward looking, corporate thinking and dynamics. Thank you for a presentation that provokes to think and ask questions
- For me especially the ‘removing of traditional middle-man’ concept (in this case large system developers / integrators) rings a bell. This is what we were saying in the dot com boom era. They have of course been replaced by other type – web based middle men. Or the brick-and-mortar guys opened up also a web channel. And it would make sense – public administration on its path to e-services will follow the footsteps of e-commerce (r)evolution to some extent
- I love mash-ups and I think they are the future as they also link up to the notion of personalised services very well. We ‘only’ need to ensure that data is compatible.
- What you also talked about was effectively ‘outsourcing’ some of the functions of public administration to social networks. It is a nice idea of specialisation what I was worried though is what happens if some of your social networks suddenly disappear, what’s your back up plan. As was mentioned, people in Europe will look up for help to their governments for some generations to come still.
- And clearly all this can happen providing that (almost) everybody is online and are actually not simply online but are expert users of e-services. e-Inclusion, be part of it